A three-year-old boy in Bahrain required drastic surgery (that would be cutting open his skull) to remove a knitting needle impaled through the roof of his mouth. But he was lucky, and doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects.

We interrupt the previous rant to bring you the latest news flash from the administrator of the Stitch & Bitch Cafe. I’m not certain what motivated the mass e-mailing, because this information has been posted on their own forum since June 22. But still, I know you’re not all checking that forum, so you’re missing the posts by “Hipster” about “big belts” and by “joefrankberg” about “How to earn money”.

The following is an email sent to you by an administrator of “Stitch & Bitch Cafe”. If this message is spam, contains abusive or other comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following address:

Stop into the cafe to learn to knit, sew or crochet, get your notions or find our when the next Stitch & Bitch nights are. Learn all the basics to knit or crochet or learn to sew a fly zipper or make a pair of low-rise men’s briefs for yourself or your boyfriend.

Thank you so much for the many letters of encouragement and for your continued patronage.

In the April edition of KnitNet (I know, it’s the end of July; I only happened to look today) we have a pretty brief editorial based on the theme of “no good deed ever goes unpunished”. This moral is supported by a very brief story about why the current issue of KnitNet was low on patterns:

[W]e think of [the April] edition as our chance to welcome new designers — not just new to us, but new to the business of designing — in order to give them a chance to work with professionals. Our hope is that they’ll be able to hone their skills, particularly the difficult and exacting art of pattern writing…

Sometimes, it doesn’t work out quite the way we intended.

This year, for example, after more than a month of working with her, one designer balked at her patterns being brought into line with KnitNet standards. We pride ourselves on offering consistent, accurate patterns so felt we had to insist. Ultimately, she took her socks and went home.

Too bad for all of us because, not only did it delay publication by weeks, it leaves us a little shy on patterns for this edition.

The editrix thinks there’s a lesson to be learned with. I spot two:

1. The designer — even a new one — should have realized that all publications have standards for pattern writing (and this page links to KnitNet’s standards in PDF form). Assuming that the tech editor wasn’t proposing to do something that changed the meaning of the pattern instructions, well, that’s the way it is, but somehow I find it hard to believe that even a first-time contributor would object to a particular style of abbreviation or formatting. I wonder what happened?

2. I am apparently old-fashioned enough to think that it is not professional for an editor of a periodical to describe, in an editorial, how difficult it was to work with a would-be contributor, and to use that story to explain why an issue was late or otherwise lacking.

And an exercise for discussion: what was the “good deed”, anyway?

And as a bonus, lesson number three can be found here, in a reprint of an earlier gem penned by the publisher:

Everywhere I look on the Web, every search I do turns up, not useful and valuable information any more, but increasingly, somebody’s personal opinion, on their website or blog or podcast.

Now there is nothing wrong with this… The problem is that all this opinion on the Web makes searching for the facts more and more difficult. Now I have to wear my hip waders when I surf the Web. It gets harder and harder to find the pearls in amongst the straw.

There has been much talk of creating two separate Webs, one for business and one for personal use. I think it is a great idea. It can’t come too soon.

Hey, Web 1.0 called. It wants its web-safe palette back. Will his opinion change in 2012 when he learns about the companies engaging in topical or vertical searching?

I can understand being overwhelmed by the volume of user-generated content out there, but the individual searching the web for answers doesn’t cope only by taking information with a grain of salt; he needs to learn how and where to ask questions… and sometimes the “where” is “not on the Internet”. (That’s a fact.)

Dividing the world of information into “business” and “personal” (excuse my ignorance, but what is he talking about? .biz? a non-HTTP protocol? what “separate Web”?) doesn’t solve the problem of separating fact from opinion. (That’s an opinion.)

Also, Ravelry + this guy = some kind of explosion that will tear a hole in the universe. (Is that fact or opinion?)

I have already lived to regret glibly posting that I’d see if Mrs C’s gynametric pattern drafting instructions had any relevance to an uncorseted, food-loving twenty-first century body. If you’re going to follow along, you’ll need the PDF that Kathleen posted; I’m starting at page 11.

The style of English language has evolved over the years, which sometimes makes reading old texts slightly challenging. A well-written text, though, will not present a problem to the modern reader. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. For just about every sentence I’ve read so far — and I haven’t got very far — I’ve come up with about three interpretations of Mrs C’s instructions before I’ve hit on (what I think is) the right one.

The meandering post after the jump is my thought process as I tried to follow the instructions in the book. The first part was done very late at night, right after I had finished drafting a patent application, so I wasn’t in a mood to make allowances for ambiguity.

Kathleen Fasanella just posted pages from The Science of Gynametry by Mrs. M.V. Coleman, published in 1887. Instructions on drafting a (sewing) pattern based on a single body measurement: your wrist! When I have time, I’m going to try this out to see how it works with my body.

ETA: I started going through this very late last night. My text notes, on review, are indicative of the lateness of the hour, but I’m going to keep ‘em as is when I post them. For now, I’ll note that after deciphering half a page of instructions, despite her introductory claim, Mrs C did not derive every single dimension from the wrist measurement; she had to account for the variation in our relative amount of flesh, so she divided bodies into “classes” and “orders” based on back waist length and waist measurement. Ha!

If you’re on the Colourway mailing list, you’ll have seen the notice about the end of the Jaeger line of yarns that had been sister to Rowan for so many years. (Colourway has marked down the yarns by 25%, and is offering a free Jaeger book with each order of ten balls or more, any kind and colour, as long as it’s Jaeger — they say to include the book in your order and type FREE BOOK in the special delivery instructions box when you order.)

The blow is softened, of course, by the grown of the RYC line. Creatively speaking, I won’t miss Jaeger terribly, although the only RYC yarn that holds any attraction for me is their Silk Wool DK. I’m just sorry to see the end of venerated brands.